The White House announced that Donald Trump picked Kathleen Hartnett White, a skeptic of climate change science, to serve as a member, and eventually chairwoman, of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ).thehill.com(See also Climate Change, Scott Pruitt)

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said a newly released government report that lays most of the blame for the rise of global temperatures to human activity won't deter him from continuing to roll back the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, a major rule aimed at combating climate change.usatoday.com(See also Scott Pruitt, Environmental Protection Agency, Climate Change)

2017.11.15

The Trump administration plans to allow hunters to bring trophies of elephants they killed in Zimbabwe and Zambia back to the United States, reversing a ban put in place by the Obama administration in 2014.abcnews.go.com(See also Foreign Policy)

2017.11.16

About 5,000 barrels of oil, or about 210,000 gallons, gushed out of the Keystone Pipeline on Thursday in South Dakota, blackening a grassy field in the remote northeast part of the state and sending cleanup crews and emergency workers scrambling to the site.nytimes.com(See also Keystone XL Pipeline)

“We’ve always said it’s not a question of whether a pipeline will spill, but when, and today TransCanada is making our case for us,” Kelly Martin of the Sierra Club said in a statement. “This is not the first time TransCanada’s pipeline has spilled toxic tar sands, and it won’t be the last.”

2017.12.05

One day after Donald Trump ordered an unprecedented reduction of a pair of national monuments in Utah, his administration announced plans to modify a slew of other protected wildlands scattered across the country, including shrinking Gold Butte National Monument, a nearly 300,000-acre site in Nevada, and Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, which spans just over 100,000 acres on the California–Oregon border.buzzfeed.com(See also Department of the Interior, Ryan Zinke)

Twenty-one young people are suing the US government for contributing to climate change in violation of their constitutional rights, but the Trump administration is trying to keep the landmark lawsuit from going to trial.buzzfeed.com(See also Legal Issues, Climate Change)

The Trump administration will allow new offshore oil and gas drilling in nearly all United States waters, giving the energy industry broad access to drilling rights in most parts of the outer continental shelf, including Pacific waters near California, Atlantic waters near Maine and the eastern Gulf of Mexico, reversing a ban on drilling, imposed by President Obama in his final days in office, that protected more than 100 million offshore acres along the Arctic and Eastern Seaboard.nytimes.com(See also Ryan Zinke, Department of the Interior, Energy, Reversals)

If the Environmental Protection Agency does not implement restrictions on pesticides (including chlorpyrifos, which hampers the development of children's brains) advocated in a recent National Marine Fisheries Services report, environmental activists and commercial fisheries hoping to preserve Pacific Northwest stocks of “salmon, sturgeon, orca and other endangered species” may file lawsuits.gizmodo.com(See also Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, Reversals)

This was a reversal of a Barack Obama-era initiative to ban chlorpyrifos, but changed after a meeting between Scott Pruitt and Andrew Liveris, the then-head of its manufacturer, Dow Chemical.

The waiver excludes rules from major laws including the National Environment Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Historic Preservation Act and the Antiquities Act, among others.

2018.01.29

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt was personally involved in the purging of information from the agency’s website in the early months of the Trump administration, according to documents obtained by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), as pages on the EPA’s website about climate change started disappearing or getting redirected to sites touting the president’s fossil fuel agenda.thinkprogress.org(See also Scott Pruitt, Environmental Protection Agency, Censorship)

Assessments

2016.11.09 "What Trump can—and can't—do all by himself on climate" (Science)"Trump has promised to 'cancel' the Paris agreement, the recently adopted global deal to curb global warming, and to curb climate regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), including the Clean Power Plan to cut emissions from coal-fired power plants, during his first 100 days in office."